Timothy's Thoughts

I ’ve been something of a student of speeches and presentations lately. One of the things that really stands out it that if you want to hold an audience, you have to make it clear to the audience that what you have to say is going to help them in some way and you have to do it quickly. At the very least, the audience how to understand that you are giving talking about something that they will be called to use. The same thing can be said of blog posts or pretty much any other form of communication. Take a presentation by Nancy Duarte at TEDx East for example. She walks out on stage and says, “You have the power to change the world.” Now, contrast that with a TED presentation by Deb Roy. He walks out on stage and says, “Imagine if you could record your life.” He then shows a family picture of him and his wife bringing their son home from the hospital and how they recorded their lives and then used those recordings to trace the origins of language, words like water, etc. He even plays ...

L ife beats down on us like a hailstorm. I can’t count the times I’ve sat through a lecture, read an article, or watched a program in which someone enumerated all the things that are wrong with something. Christianity is declining in America. Terrorists are taking control of some foreign government. Drug lords are killing people in Mexico. The price of fuel is going up. Like one hailstone after another, it beats us down until we have no hope left. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And I don’t mean we just have to reverse the video as has been popular and have Mexico people killing drug lords and foreign governments controlling terrorists. I also don’t mean we simply pretend this stuff isn’t happening. For as long as we walk this green earth, we have the power to change the world. We don’t have to beat people down to do it. I believe that one of the biggest mistakes communicators can make is to believe that people will take action if they see the problem. People won’t take the actio...

I heard my father’s voice the other day, which is an amazing thing since he lives 600 miles away and I wasn’t on the phone. It happened in handbook time during Awana. One of the boys in my group had a lengthy section to pass. It was a review section in which he was so supposed to give four answers to the question “Why did God give us the Bible?” and recite a backup verse for each one. In the Awana book, the answers are listed and the first three words of each backup verse is given. Because it is review, it is conceivable that a clubber could spend a little bit of time looking at the order the answers and back up verses come in and simply recite what they’ve already learned in order. But it is rare that these kids will do that. It is more frequent that they do what caused me to hear my father’s voice the other night. This particular clubber looked at the section he had to pass and the first words out of his mouth were, “I can’t do this.” “Why not?” I asked. “It’s too long,” he sa...

C hurches are notorious for being behind the times when it comes to technology. My own church only recently purchased a large projection screen on which we display the announcements and the pastor’s sermon outline as his preaches. As for our classrooms, most of them don’t have a computer and a projector. After reading Nancy Duarte’s books resonate and slide:ology , I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t a good thing. I’ve spent enough time working in corporate America to have seen many presentations. For some reason, the moment you install Power Point on a worker’s machine, his ability to communicate flies out the window. I’ve sat through meetings in which a presenter sat at a computer at the back of the room and read from an acronym laden slide at the front of the room that looked more like an eye chart than a slide. I have sat through meetings and amused myself by trying to guess which co-worker would nod off first. As eager as people are for churches to embrace technology, my fe...

J esus was a friend to sinners. That was actually one of the biggest criticisms the religious leaders of his day had about him. Today, some take the fact that Jesus was a friend to sinners to mean that we should participate in the activities of sinners. After all, if we want to be friends with a man who drinks, shouldn’t we go out drinking with him? I would like to suggest that we need to look at this differently. The reason Jesus was a friend to sinners is because Jesus was a friend to people that the religious leaders recognized as sinners. For that matter, the people Jesus hung out with recognized themselves as sinners. I write books. That means that I want to sell books. That isn’t as easy as it seems like it should be. I have found, however, that it's possible to sell some books just by hanging out in various places on the internet, participating in the conversation and occasionally mentioning a book. But here’s the thing. When I hang out on sites that authors frequent my bo...

S ometimes I get e-mail because of something I wrote. One e-mail came because of an article I posted online titled, “Are We Obligated to Marry?” The article was in reaction to another writer saying that the churches’ responsibility to singles is to get them married. The person who e-mailed me found my article helpful because she was in a situation in which people were trying to set her up but she didn’t feel that she was ready to be in a relationship. She asked me some direct questions that I won’t repeat, but in answering her questions I began to think about how we handle these well-meaning people who try to set singles up. I’ve had so many people try to set me up with someone that I can’t remember how many times it has happened, but it always goes in pretty much the same way. Someone walks up to you and says, “Hey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” At this point, you don’t know that they are trying to set you up. Many times, it is someone we know, but we do...

D o I want the hardback version of this book or the electronic version of this book? That’s the question I asked myself the other day as I was considering the purchase of a book that hadn’t been released yet. I think what surprised me the most was how tempting it was for me to purchase both versions. The electronic version has its advantages in that it will be delivered on the day of release and not two days later. It is also a couple of dollars cheaper, but that was hardly a concern, considering that I thought about buying both. The hardback version also has its advantages. With the hardback version, someone can walk into the house, see it lying on a table and ask if it is any good. Another advantage over the electronic version is that it will last a lot longer. Think about all of the software companies that have gone out of business or sold off a product that isn’t supported by the company that bought it. The eBook industry looks great right now, but one of these days there will be a...